I spent five years at Forbes writing about business and leadership, attracting nearly one million unique visitors to Forbes.com each month. While here, I assistant edited the annual World’s 100 Most Powerful Women package and helped launch and grow ForbesWoman.com. I've appeared on CBS, CNBC, MSNBC and E Entertainment and speak often at conferences and events on women's leadership topics. I graduated summa cum laude from New York University with degrees in journalism and sociology and was honored with a best in business award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) in 2012. My work has appeared in Businessweek, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Aesthete and Acura Style. I live in New York City with my husband and can be found on Twitter @Jenna_Goudreau, Facebook, and Google+.

Lynn Tilton: Is She The Richest Self-Made Woman In America?

She seems to have come out of nowhere. Go to her website. You’ll learn that she’s a fiercely smart, Yale-educated, hardworking single mom who learned her chops on Wall Street. Then she went off on her own, becoming a rare phenomenon: a female chief of a private equity firm, whose success has turned her into a very wealthy woman. “There’s no question that I’m a billionaire,” she assured me.

Talk to former employees, and you sometimes get a very different story. They speak in whispers of a “terrifying” and “evil” boss, given to eruptions of rage, who exploits her femininity to throw off men, who threw herself a 50th birthday party where staffers did jello shots off her stomach and chest. When we asked her about these personal allegations, a spokesman wrote back, “We will not respond to anonymous, vague, deliberate and frankly sexist attempts to impugn Ms. Tilton’s personal and professional reputation.”

Who is Lynn Tilton? There’s no simple answer.

Back in January, I set out to discover more about the private-equity impresario in order to see if she qualified for our Billionaires’ List. I ended up with a lot more—a warning to “tread lightly,” threats from Tilton’s lawyers to stop pursuing certain angles, hang-ups or frightened responses from people I called to learn more about her. Her attorneys sent several letters to FORBES threatening litigation before we’d published a word.

I was first spurred on, in part, by a flattering profile of her in the Wall Street Journal, which reported that Tilton controls companies with 120,000 employees and sales exceeding $8 billion. Her own website says she has owned 150 companies and saved 250,000 jobs since 2000. The story never quite said she was a billionaire, though it suggested she’d gotten very rich from buying up distressed industrial companies no one else seemed to want via her firm, Patriarch Partners. It also suggested an intriguingly salty side of Tilton: a demonically hard worker who wore provocative clothing and enough jewelry to make a tsarina envious (her collection is worth $25 million).

After my first call to Patriarch, the firm sounded excited to talk and within 48 hours I was on the phone with Tilton and one of her managing directors, Randy Jones, who referred to her as “the richest self-made woman in America.” (Just for comparison’s sake, Oprah Winfrey is worth $2.7 billion.) I let them know what kinds of financial documents I needed to see, and we set up an interview for 12 days later.

Looking into Tilton, I quickly discovered that ever since the recession, she’s been all over the business channels—CNBC, Fox, Bloomberg TV, where she is sometimes introduced as “the self-made billionaire.” In good Trump fashion, she has a reality show about her business (“Diva of Distressed”) in the works with the Sundance Channel. She has also taken out full-page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post and contributed op-eds to the Huffington Post about the need to save manufacturing jobs in America. She writes on her Dust to Diamonds blog, tweets from @LynnTilton and updates her 1,500 Facebook followers on her progress (mostly stuff about conferences where she’s speaking or saving American jobs).

My first interview was cordial. Enter her offices on the 17th floor of her downtown Manhattan HQ and you walk into the Lynn Tilton show. A life-size cardboard cutout of Tilton greets you at the door; photos of her at different companies line a side table; a giant close up of her face stares from the waiting room wall. That was nothing compared to the real woman: Dressed in a fur-lined jacket, a tan miniskirt that rode up her hips and suede boots with 5-inch heels, Tilton sported a diamond ring about the size of a cherry and huge dangling diamond earrings that flashed when she flicked her bleach-blond hair worn waist-length.

Over the next hour or so, she showed me a statement from her accountant, Anchin, Block & Anchin, of private assets like gold and cash (totaling $544 million), and flipped through estimated values of some of her portfolio companies. Toward the end, Tilton gave me a tour of the offices. Outside her suite are handcuffs, whip and cowboy hat–emblematic, she says, of her kicking companies into shape.

When I asked Randy Jones for the names of people to call, he gave me the number of Patriarch managing director Charles Sweet, who has worked for Tilton for seven years. As a higher up, I figured Sweet would know something about Patriarch’s financing. But when I got him on the phone and asked him about the intricacies of Tilton’s business model, he said, “Only Lynn knows.”

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“When you talk to people at companies, they’re not going to understand the financing behind the structure. Like a Jeff Stafeil runs the auto platform, he doesn’t worry about it except that he’s got the money.”

So the owners of the distressed companies have no idea what kind of deal they’ve got themselves into..they’re just blindly following her lead? Well, if nothing else, she’s definitely got that Wall Street touch.

A piece of dogged reporting, Jenna, and writing so tight you could bounce one of Tilton’s diamonds off it. One of her and her lawyer’s major complaints with you, as the reporter, is that you are *only* 26 and lack a finance background. Ha! Well, F. Scott Fitzgerald was *only* 29 when Great Gatsby was published–another tale of questionable identity, hyper-materialism, social climbing and whispers about business dealings.

This series has included quotes from a fired employee, Jason Colodne. Would not journalist ethics require that Ms Goudreau disclose her own prior affiliations and reports with his former girlfriend Bethenny Frankel? Ms Goudeau at least had the sense to characterize her initial interest as being “in part” due to a WSJ story. Instead of questioning Ms Tilton’s motivations, perhaps Ms Goudeau should be more honest about her own.